Page 45 of The Vanished Bennet Sister

"She has not come to me," he said, before anyone had spoken. "I have not seen her today. What has happened?"

"Sit down, Mr Thwaite," Elizabeth said.

"I would rather stand. Tell me."

Elizabeth glanced at her mother, who seemed to be bracing for a hard impact. Mrs Bennet made a small, distressed sound and exhaled deeply.

"Mama. I am going to tell him."

"Lizzy, don't." Mrs Bennet said. She was naturally prone to paleness, but she appeared to be growing whiter by the second.

"There is no point in holding onto secrets any longer. There are too many consequences already in motion. More to the point, Mr Thwaite loves Mary. That is plain to anyone in this room with eyes. He is not going to love her any less for this news, and Mary needs him to express it, and he cannot help us find her if he does not understand what she is dealing with."

Mrs Bennet looked at her for a moment, and then at Mr Thwaite, and the resistance went out of her face. "Tell him then," she said, in a small voice. "Tell him everything."

Elizabeth did as told.

"I received some intelligence this morning, of a personal and significant nature. It concerns the circumstances of Mary’s origins." She kept her voice even, to avoid stirring more of the turmoil that bubbled within her. "She was not born to this family. She was taken in as an infant, by my mother and father, and has been raised as their own. I'm not sure if her sudden disappearance today was influenced by that news. She might have learned of this fact one way or the other and found it devastating."

She went on to explain who Alice Haverford was, the intricate details of Mary's birth, and the correspondence with Alice that had never been maintained.

She finished the narration by speaking at length about how Mrs Bingley had extracted information from their mother and what she intended to do with it.

Mr Thwaite listened without interrupting once. His expression was controlled throughout, but not entirely. His furrowed eyebrows signalled compassion for Mary and a feeling that was not quite anger towards Mrs Bennet, but quite near its neighbour. He glanced around the room, his eyes settling on every Bennet sister, before dropping to the floor.

"You should have told her," he said to Mrs Bennet. His voice was not unkind, but it was not gentle either. "Whatever your reasons, and I do not doubt they were real reasons, she should have known."

Mrs Bennet released an anguished sound. It was filled with remorse. "I know it," she said, dabbing her teary face with a handkerchief. "I know now. I just strongly felt that she was my own daughter, to raise and love. I could not bear the thought of letting her go or having her feel insecure about her position in the family. She's just as important as the others, you see. My solemn dove. All I want is to have her back. That is all I desire, to have her by my side again. I want her home and I want to tell her the truth myself, after which I'd like to ask for her forgiveness."

"That is a good plan to work towards," he said. He was quiet again, briefly, and then said: "There is something else you all should know. Regarding the matter with Miss Bingley."

"Before you go on," Elizabeth said. "There's something else I ought to have mentioned. It was one of the things weighing on Mary this season. She had been concerned that Caroline Bingley's attentions to you might, over time, produce some effect. That you might change your… In conclusion, she was worried. More than she showed."

Mr Thwaite looked taken aback, as though he had received information he would never have considered until now. "She never said anything to me."

"Certainly not. There is no proper way to bring up such a topic. It makes sense that she did not and kept her anxieties to herself. I was lucky, myself, to be privy to that fact. Mary can be quite secretive when she wishes to be. She'd much rather take on the strain of certain emotions than burden someone else with them."

"I want it known — I want her to hear it from me, as soon as she is home — that Caroline Bingley has been, at every point this season, a less relevant point. I did not notice the specialness of her conduct towards me and I was not aware that Mary had concerns of that kind. I was not paying adequate attention to what she was withholding." He said this last statement with flat, honest self-reproach “That is my failure, and I intend to address it directly when I have the chance."

"You will have the chance," Jane murmured. In prime Jane nature, the statement did not sound wishful. It was grounded, as if the outcome were a matter she had already analysed and found sound.

"We will find her," Elizabeth agreed.

"Yes." Mr Thwaite rose to his feet, ready to act at that moment. Now that all this information was available to him, he appeared ready to head out in search of Mary and offer her reassurance. "We should divide ourselves up, alongside the footmen and some of the maids and search the streets near the square. We must ensure all directions are covered."

Jane offered to write to the Gardiners, in case Mary had gone visiting.

Mr Thwaite nodded in approval. "Is there anywhere else? Any other connection she might have gone to?"

"There is one more detail," Elizabeth replied. "We know she had a note sent this morning to an address on Jermyn Street. There is a chance that is a correspondent she has been in contact with. If we can identify—"

She stopped, because Lydia had appeared in the doorway.

She had excused herself from the room without explanation, which was the kind of thing Elizabeth typically tracked but had, in the flurry of the afternoon's conversation, not taken stock of. Lydia was carrying something, a small lacquered box, dark green, with a brass clasp that Elizabeth recognised immediately as the writing box that had lived on Mary's desk since Longbourn.

The lock was open.

"I went up to look for clues in her rooms," Lydia said. "I thought there might be something that would tell us where she'd gone." She glanced down at the box and shook her head in disbelief. "The box wasn't locked, which is a rare sight. She must have departed too quickly to pay attention to that detail. She's been writing to someone for a while, from the look of it. A woman by the name Elena. I think it might explain where she's gone."